After spending yesterday in downtown DC watching the second inauguration of President Barack Obama -- and listening to commentators quickly split into those who saw his inaugural speech as ambitious and visionary and those who denounced it as overly liberal and partisan – I was heartened to see the new numbers. They showed, among other things, that the graduation rate of Latino students, who are the fastest growing demographic in the country, has jumped by 10 percentage points in just the past five years, from 61.4 percent in 2006 to 71.4 percent in 2010.

Watching the political gridlock in Washington, it is easy to conclude that progress in social policy has become almost impossible. We are regularly warned that a whole raft of serious problems – government debt, climate change, spiraling health care costs – are escalating while the government fails to agree on the big solutions that such big problems seem to require. But in part we may just be too impatient. In a large, complex democracy, progress tends to come in small, sometimes unnoticed steps, rather than in huge leaps.

The gains in high school completion are a case in point. It is really only in the last decade or so that the United States made it a national goal to raise education performance; before that, education was left almost exclusively to the states. The No Child Left Behind act ushered in by President George W. Bush with strong Democratic support did, for all its flaws, put the weight of the federal government behind education reform. The Obama administration, while tweaking the approach in various ways, has continued to use an array of both sticks and carrots to try to encourage states to raise their game.

President Obama put a big list of problems on the table in his inaugural address – economic inequality, immigration, gun violence, and climate change. In none of these, with the possible exception of immigration, is he likely to get a big, grand bargain solution. But that does not mean that progress is impossible.

The lesson from recent years is not that big solutions are not needed, but instead that focusing over time on big social problems, and acting in small increments where larger ones are impossible, can still produce significant gains. What matters most is moving in the right directions.